Today, a mobile user's data session is anchored on a mobile gateway such as a (GGSN, PGW) working as part of a mobile packet core. Anchoring the mobile data session on the mobile gateway includes anchoring both control and data traffic flows between the user's device and the mobile gateway. Control traffic is exchanged between the user's device and the gateway, and then terminated on the gateway. In an uplink direction, the data traffic is decapsulated from a mobile encapsulation protocol and presented on a Gi interface as Internet Protocol (IP) packets. The data traffic is then often sent either to a service provider private network to deliver services or service provider private content, or is sent to the Internet for content delivery. The mobile gateway terminates tunnel encapsulation specific to the mobile network and presents IP traffic on its Internet facing interface. The mobile gateway is also responsible to applying various services to the data stream based on a user profile. Examples of such services include quality of service (QoS), deep packet inspection, traffic management, lawful intercept, http header enrichment as well as billing the data stream sent to and/or from the user. These services are applied in the mobile packet core, and mobile operators typically have a complete infrastructure to provide these services to the mobile user based on his or her profile. All of the data traffic between the user equipment and its termination point in both the uplink and downlink directions passes via the mobile gateway.
Some Radio Access Network (RAN) vendors enable the execution of “services” inside a base station. These services may run as an application on virtual machines, and the virtual machines may be hosted on the base station's processing infrastructure. All (GTP-based) traffic sent from and received by the base station is routed through the base station hosted “services” to enable in-line service delivery on per-subscriber packet stream. The idea is that by hosting services in the base station, caching, storing and latency saving functions can execute and optimize for the wireless specifics. These services operate “on-top-of” the cellular infrastructure and are not integrated into the cellular networking standards.